theclassic.org

Purpose

The purpose of this site is to provide participants, fans, media and other interested parties with the most accurate, up-to-date information on one of America’s largest co-ed high school holiday basketball tournaments, The State Farm Holiday Classic.

Our scoreboard pages are quite popular during the four days of the tournament. They provide near real-time scoring and official game boxscores from all 128 games. Official boxscores are posted as soon as possible following games as well.

Credits

This site is developed, maintained and hosted by Ben Matthews of Ben A. Matthews Design. Ben is a member of Classic Tournament, Inc., which is made up of over 30 volunteers who are charged with running the State Farm Holiday Classic.

Much of the website’s functionality is credited to David Harris. David developed many of the database portions of this website, allowing volunteers to create and upload official boxscores following games, and coaches and athletic directors to enter and update their rosters, schedules, and other information about their teams prior to the tournament.

As of the 2017 tournament, our live scoring during the Tournament is thanks to a partnership with ScoreStream. ScoreStream is a fan-driven high school sports app and platform. Their app allows fans, as well as volunteers, to interact with the tournament by providing real-time updates from the games they attend, including score updates, photos and more.

Bill Matthews was responsible for developing a database that was used for the boxscores from 2004-2006 which were posted to the web and distributed to appropriate individuals at the conclusion of games. The database he developed was modified to work with the new web-based system now in place and is still used to create the boxscore reports. He also helps maintain and administer the site during the Classic.

Technology

The site is developed to work on as many different browsers and platforms as possible and is mobile-responsive. While previous versions of theclassic.org were developed in html, the current version of the site is developed almost exclusively on the WordPress platform. The database that powers some sections of the website is developed using mySQL and PHP.